TEHRAN (FNA)- A group of Saudi students were caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college in the US and were taken back home by Riyadh officials before being punished by Washington, according to one of the documents gained and released by the Yemen Cyber Army after its May hacking of the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

According to the YCA-released document, the students were offered flights home by their kingdom's diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest.

The document shows that the students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee.

The cheating was discovered — and the staffer was fired — following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos revealed for the first time that the students were almost all Saudis and that their government booked them flights home following a meeting between college administrators and Saudi diplomats in Washington just before the scandal broke.

A Saudi memo describing the meeting, dated Feb. 3, 2012 and labeled "Secret / Urgent," says it was Montana Tech Chancellor Donald Blackketter who floated the idea of flying the students out of the United States. The memo goes on to say that an unidentified diplomat at the embassy subsequently "issued travel tickets to those students ... to return to the kingdom so they don't face jail or deportation by the American authorities".

Reached by phone at his home in Butte, Montana, the college's Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs Douglas Abbott told the AP that the Saudi Embassy's account of the meeting sounded accurate.

"I think that we might've recommended that," he said of the flights. Montana law doesn't bar the alteration of school records — even in return for gifts — but Abbott said that, at the time, campus authorities believed the students could be arrested or even expelled from the country.

"We didn't know whether this would happen, whether ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) would show up on the Montana Tech campus," he said.

Late in May, the Yemen Cyber Army released a portion of the information and documents that it had gained in its recent cyber attack on Saudi Arabia's Foreign, Interior and Defense Ministries.

The Yemen Cyber Army announced that it has hacked the website, servers and archives of Saudi Arabia's Foreign, Interior and Defense ministries and would release thousands of these top secret documents.

The group claimed that it "has gained access to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) network and have full control over more than 3000 computers and servers, and thousands of users. We also have access to the emails, personal and secret information of hundreds of thousands of their staff and diplomats in different missions around the world".

The hackers' statement, which said the cyber army has also attacked the Saudi Interior and Defense ministries and vowed to release their details later, was carried by several globally known hackers websites.

Following the hack in May, the Yemen Cyber Army sent a copy of its information to FNA and another one to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

"WikiLeaks released over 60,000 documents on Friday and vowed to release the rest in coming weeks, but we plan to release the documents in separate news items since many of them contain the names of foreign nationals who have demanded visit to Saudi Arabia, for example for Hajj pilgrimage, and their names have been mentioned among the Saudi agents. Thus releasing the list of names and documents might hurt innocent individuals who have done nothing, but applied for visa at a Saudi embassy for doing Hajj pilgrimage," FNA English Editor-in-Chief Seyed Mostafa Khoshcheshm said.

"The number of the documents is way beyond the 500,000 that has been announced by WikiLeaks, but they need to be checked first to make sure that they do not contain misleading information and are not harmful to innocent people," he added.

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